DFI part nine. The super serious one. Well, a little bit serious.

All right, time to get serious. I thought that after eight weeks of writing a sometimes tongue in cheek and occasionally profane overlong stream-of consciousness reflections on the day and the week (professionally) it is time to bite down on my mouthguard, step forward and write something ‘teachery’. I apologise for the tonal shift, knowing it didn’t work so well in the ‘DFI part 7 Meme This’ post. I'm not sure whether the whole 'unreliable narrator' style I adopted for my cyberstupidity post worked so well either. Like an omelette, it's easy to overdo and it ends up a bit dry.

We all know that in our profession, when choosing words and terms for our academic we have our own jargon which we create our own meanings for. And if faced between a choice of fairly simple language or difficult abstract language we go for the complex every time. With that short intro, I give you my teachery paragraph reflection on the DFI…

The DFI has the focus on key digital competencies with teacher-driven and developmentally appropriate emphasis on the google suite. With a collegial atmosphere, the DFI was both learning intensive (as per the name) and bridged cognitive and affective domains. Within the new paradigm (learn, create, share) and for our 21st Century learners we took a ‘deep dive’ across a number of different modal structures, attempting to synergise trans-disciplinarity. Technology-enhanced holistic learning can obviously act as a catalyst in any synergism. My inquiry-driven functionalities have included linking sheets, forms and docs. As the digital representative on staff, I have had to deliver learner-centered learning as staff development and although there has been some cognitive disequilibrium amongst pedagogues from a different iteration, it has, in the main, and through the experiential-based learning process, been impactful. In fact, as a point of convergence, proficiencies of major stakeholders have been enhanced and maximised in an expedited process with a range of modalities.

Actually, the beauty (and the curse) of using all these high-level abstractions is the ambiguity. Instead of asking,  ‘What does this mean?’ you should be asking, ‘What do I want this to mean?’

Back to my normal flippant tone.

I’ve also used the ‘synergy’ buzzword a couple of times. I used to be confused with this term and was told helpfully several times that it was ‘like the Rolling Stones’ as in the whole was more than a sum of the parts. I heard this several times from several people and have concluded that none of them know anything about the Rolling Stones, a band that has become synonymous with rock n’ roll. For starters, the Stones have put out some absolute rubbish - 1989’s Steel Wheels for example. 67’s Satanic Majesties was also a confused rip-off of the Beatles Sergeant Peppers psychedelic album. So they are not always great. And live shows can be a lottery given some members of the band overdo the dope. But their lineup has included some fantastic musicians. Keith Richards, the personification of drug use, is an extremely creative master of riff. Wyman, Watts, Jagger - all talented. Consider Mick Taylor, famously expelled from a band (that contains Keith Richards) for being too boozed and drugged. Ronnie Wood - also under-rated. Critically, their ‘Exile On Main Street’ album is the most acclaimed but my personal favourite is 1969’s Let it Bleed closely followed by 1971's Sticky Fingers. I'm reminded of Harrison Ford's Han Solo  character snarling 'the force doesn't work like that'. Nor does synergy. Don't compare synergy with the Rolling Stones! Slight diversion but hey. Synergy.

This is the album cover for Let It Bleed. You'd think it would be more appropriate for "Sticky Fingers" but I think they had something else in mind....

One of my fellow DFIers was not looking forward to writing this blog and suggested that instead of writing a large blog post just submit a couple of pictures because ‘a picture’s worth a thousand words.’ Whoever made that saying up was obviously not a massive book reading nerd like myself. Groucho Marx actually said it best: “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read” although I’m pretty sure that last part was just a guess. Incidentally, Groucho is my favourite Marx - way funnier than Karl, whose writing about society, politics and religion isn’t funny at all. And Malcolm Marx doesn’t even write, but throws the ball very accurately into the South African lineout. Much like the rest of the South African forward pack, he resembles an angry lamp-post and, consequently, I’ll bet he never has to endure painful puns about being the ‘hooker’. Just thought I’d get in a rugby reference as the World Cup is about to kick off tomorrow.

This is Groucho. Karl has an enormous beard (a bit like Herman) and Malcolm, like I said, looks like a monster.

This final session has been mainly tied up with sitting an exam. Like some of the boys that I teach I prepared thoroughly by relaxing and having beers last night (and the night before) and was slightly disturbed when Ubby declared this morning that she’d watched all the google videos on the 'exam' channel we had all subscribed to. Those videos are about 45 minutes each and she’d spent something like 10 hours trawling through them the previous day. We’re marking exams at the moment and after marking a series of essays on ‘unfamiliar texts’ my brain kind of splutters like an old tractor and just gives up. (I can get through about six before my brain wanders off somewhere) So that was partly my excuse for not studying, the other was a false sense of confidence. Anyway, I felt that I’d benefited significantly from doing the DFI and the google qualification actually means very little to my colleagues and students. Very little is probably an exaggeration.

The exam was fairly time-consuming and I’d hoped to be finished really quickly. In fact I had kind of hoped there’d be some kind of marking schedule as I went so that as soon as I knew I’d passed, I could stop typing and have another coffee and a crack at all the nice food everyone brought in today. Sadly that did not happen. There was more google classroom stuff than I expected and the (fairly basic) questions on sheets were a stretch: lucky I had made a whole bunch of charts on the exams I have just marked and sent them around the rest of the department like a complete show-off. I managed to slog through the exam and gained a pass. 

If I were to list some of the benefits of the DFI, (and I will right here) they would include: google groups, indexing, learning around sites, sheets, forms and media. Being the student was fun and the group - friendly, helpful, studious- was a good mix: knowing what’s happening in the primary schools is a wake up in that they are doing some fairly fancy tech stuff and we need to be able to challenge and extend our students that are coming through. Some cohorts will be coming with real skill. However, some of the other benefits of the DFI are less tangible. Such as a sense of well-being I definitely didn't have this time last year as I've been able to spend each Friday around adults learning stuff.  We'll miss coming in early on a Friday and chatting about the new stuff we've tried. I'll miss my fellow DFIers. Anyway, I'm off for a beer. Thanks for reading.